Read Channel Shore for Free Online Page A

Watson-Watt, entitled ‘Detection and Location of Enemy Aircraft by Radio Methods’. Radar was born, and at a stroke Doctor Tucker’s sound mirrors were redundant. His plea for the two systems to be combined, with a chain of massive mirrors at sixteen-mile intervals from Norfolk to Dorset, was dismissed. The order was given for the existing sound mirrors to be destroyed, but through bureaucratic inertia they survived. Several still stand, mute and massive, their concrete stained and crumbling, like monuments built by some ancient civilisation for purposes lost in time.
    It is a strange place, Dungeness, not like anywhere else. It is triangular, shaped rather like the blade of a turfing spade, with its sharp end thrust out into the Channel. Its position means that it acts as a trap for the shingle shifted east along the shore by the prevailing wind-driven movement of water. The result is that the nose of the Ness, built up by the recruitment of shingle, is inclined to push ever further out. The south side of the triangle, immediately in front of the nuclear power stations, Dungeness B and the now-redundant Dungeness A, is exposed to the full force of the longshore drift and, if left to its own devices, rapidly erodes. For a long time it has been necessary to transfer enormous quantities of shingle from the eastern to the southern shore to save the power stations from being devoured by the sea.
    The water is deep off the beach and the tidal currents areswift. Big ships can come in close, but the low profile of the land can spell trouble when visibility is poor. There has been a succession of lighthouses, five in all. The most recent, black and white like a tubular liquorice sweet, was installed in 1961. In clear weather its light is visible twenty-five miles away.
    Before and despite the lighthouses, Dungeness was a byword for danger among mariners. The most outrageous of the many disasters overtook a passenger ship, the
Northfleet
, on the night of 22 January 1873. With 400 passengers and crew bound for Hobart, Tasmania, she was at anchor two miles off the Ness when she was struck amidships on the starboard side by a steamship going at full speed. She immediately began to list and the watch frantically hailed the vessel that had rammed her, appealing for help. The steamer, subsequently identified as the
Murillo
, a Spanish cargo ship, backed off and sailed away into the darkness.
    The
Northfleet
sank within an hour; only two of the seven lifeboats were successfully launched. Forty-three out of the 44 children on board, and 41 of the 42 women, were drowned. Altogether 291 people – most of them emigrants seeking a new life on the far side of the world – lost their lives. There was a huge fuss in Parliament, but the owners of the
Murillo
denied responsibility and in the absence of an extradition treaty between Britain and Spain there was little to be done. Eight months after the disaster, the
Murillo
was arrested off Dover, impounded and subsequently sold for £7500, the proceeds going to offset some of the insurance claims.
    For many centuries this great, bare expanse of shingle ridges, scoured and scourged by the winds, was cut off from the outside world, inhabited by a few families of inbreds who lived inhuts and scraped an existence from fishing and the detritus washed up on their shore. The arrival of two outside fishing clans – one from Cornwall, the other French in origin – began to change the Ness. The fishing, mainly for herring, became more organised. Permanent dwellings were built, low against the shingle, thick-walled to withstand the storms. In time the railway arrived, and with it employees of the Southeastern Railway Company. Some of them liked the wildness and remoteness of the place and acquired surplus train carriages and dragged them across the stones to a spot they fancied, and either lived there or came for holidays.
    This democratic and spontaneous settlement pattern established the character of